Listen to Your Listeners

By

Eric Felten

Aug. 23, 2012 5:36 p.m. ET

"People who want to play jazz actually outnumber those who enjoy or even tolerate it, let alone pay to hear it." Of all the provocations in a provocative satire of the jazz world, this was the one that seemed to cut deepest. It appeared in an article titled with sly simplicity "Careers in Jazz," written for AllAboutJazz.com by pianist Bill Anschell. Republished this summer, the essay was far and away the website's most-read article in 2009, when it first appeared. Now the article is being passed among economist-bloggers as a comic case study in market dysfunction.

ENLARGE

Joe Ciardiello

The piece presents a tawdry taxonomy of the sad and self-deluded types struggling to make music without starving. Mr. Anschell can claim to have occupied many of the various categories in the course of his own journeyman journey. A small sampling: "Gig Whores" (who will play any music at any venue with any lame band in order to pay the rent); "Jazz Educators" (who train musicians who, unable to make a living performing, become jazz educators themselves, thus perpetrating a "vicious cycle"; and "Arts Administrator" (one who "Diverts and sucks dry the scant dollars that governmental agencies and charitable foundations earmark for jazz artists").

The basic picture—a pathetic scuffle for crumbs—inspired sadder-but-wiser grins in the jazz world. But it also sparked outrage and anger among those who were unamused: "How does mocking the people who perform the music that the author professes to love help to create more jazz?" one musician sputtered (seeming to miss one of the basic points—that one doesn't need more of a good for which there are too few consumers). Musicians continue to pick sides on the story.

In Mr. Anschell's description of the jazz ecosystem, there is little discussion of the audience, other than in noting how little of it there is. Audiences do turn up here and there by way of describing musicians who have sold out, but never are they treated as in any way essential to the jazz musician's craft. (At the very end there is a devil's dictionary definition of "Smooth Jazz" that explains that smooth jazz artists are not jazz artists because they "have many fans [and] appreciate their audiences.")

Pleasing the audience has a bad odor among jazz musicians, who tend to see it as a betrayal of their artistic imperative. In the midst of his midcareer doldrums, Duke Ellington was offered some business advice by a bandleader flush with success. Ellington famously snipped in reply: "The band you run has got to please the audience. The band I run has got to please me." (Never mind that Ellington knew a lot about pleasing an audience—his hands flew from the piano keyboard with flamboyant flourish; in his heyday, Duke's show included dancers and comedians; Ellington was always seducing the crowd, cooing from the stage, "Love you madly.") It is that ideal—the artist aloof from the audience, pleasing none but himself—that has long animated the modern jazz mind-set.

Ray Charles complained in his autobiography about the "strange attitude" of jazz players: "They'd say to a crowd, 'This is my music. If you like it, cool. If not, f— it!'" Charles, not unreasonably, thought that if "People give you their bread, [they] are entitled to some kind of musical return on their dollar."

A sound business principle, that. But jazz musicians need to think about their audiences not just for the sake of their livelihoods, but even more so for the sake of their art. What is the point, after all, of making these various noises if not to have an effect on a listener?

In an interview about the filming of "North by Northwest," screenwriter Ernest Lehman recounted what director Alfred Hitchcock had told him about making a movie: "The audience is like a giant organ that you and I are playing," Hitch had said in an expansive mood. "At one moment we play this note on them and get this reaction, and then we play that chord and they react that way." He imagined that someday the film itself would be unnecessary—that audiences would have electrodes attached to their brains and by pushing the right buttons "we'll frighten them and make them laugh. Won't that be wonderful?"

Well, maybe not wonderful, but Hitchcock was expressing something fundamental about filmmaking—that a basic measure of a movie is how an audience responds to it. And that's no less true of music, which may be why Hitchcock used a musical metaphor to express the idea.

"What most of us turn to music for is an emotional experience," musician turned neuroscientist Daniel Levitin wrote in "This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession." A musician might produce awe or inspiration or exhilaration or pity or longing or terror or affection or anxiety or joy or any number of other mental states. But the musician who doesn't produce some response in some listener is a failure as an artist. The audience isn't just the group of people who pay the rent; its presence and reaction are essential to the performance.

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